Daily Archives: May 18, 2012

“I would rather have neutral sites,” Meyer said. “I’m not sure you can, on a crisp December day here in Columbus, have a Southern team come up to play. The Southern teams I coached [at Florida], I know it would be a problem.”

That’s what happens when you haven’t played a game outside the borders of the Confederacy in over twenty years, I guess.

The SEC will announce at Noon ET an agreement with the Big 12 for their champions to meet in a to-be-determined bowl game if they are not a part of the anticipated four-team playoff beginning in 2014.

An industry source said the alliance between the two conferences will be similar to that of the Big Ten and Pac-12, whose champions meet annually in the Rose Bowl if they are not a part of the BCS championship game.

“The thinking is, the Big 12 and SEC, we’re in the strongest positions right now. Let’s create a big-time matchup,” a source told CBSSports.com. “I don’t know if other leagues will create matchups like this, but this is a way for the two leagues to develop [a partnership].”

In one sense, this isn’t much: the bowl game itself is almost meaningless. There hasn’t been a national title game without a participant now a member of either conference since 2001.

But as a message, it’s profound. The ACC just found itself locked out of the public perception of being one of the major players. Now when it comes to football conferences, there’s a big four and there’s everybody else. (Unless you think there’s a lot more cachet to a ACC-Big East partnership than I do.) If you don’t think this is going to add more fuel to the FSU fire, you’re nuts. I’ll leave you to speculate on what Slive hopes to gain here. Let’s just say that if I were John Swofford’s dog, I’d be keeping a low profile today.

UPDATE: By the way, if the next step the new partnership takes is to emulate the regular season scheduling matchup the Pac-12/Big Ten have agreed to, that will take some of the sting out of the SEC staying with an 8-game conference schedule. Although I will laugh my ass off if the first pairings include South Carolina-Oklahoma and Iowa State-Georgia.

“My message would be stay in the ACC,” Bowden told Arute in a transcript provided by SiriusXM. “Do you want to win a National Championship at Florida State? You’ve got a better chance in the ACC than you have in the Big 12, or even the SEC.

“You say, ‘Well, gosh, they’re much stronger in those conferences.’ Yeah! They beat up on each other and you can’t hardly get there. You know what? Florida State, wait ‘til you get good enough to rule the ACC then you start looking for someplace to jump. But my opinion? They should stay right where they are.”

The man knows what he’s talking about. After all, that’s the real reason FSU chose to join the ACC over the SEC in the first place.

You know, cynics, a group in which I count myself as a member, are made, not born. It’s not like you emerge from the womb thinking the worst of everyone. It takes years of practice and experience to get there. But, still, there’s a part of me who wants to believe most people deserve better than that.

Which brings me to Michigan AD Dave Brandon, who really would be better served by not opening his mouth so often. I mentioned the other day how puzzled I am over the Big Ten’s decision to abandon its position of being in favor of having on-campus sites host the national semi-finals in the new college postseason arrangement. As weird as that strikes me, Brandon had to go and try to explain things (h/t MGoBlog). That only made it worse.

… Brandon understands the advantage a Big Ten team would gain from a playoff game on its campus but also realizes it’s not fair for schools across the country to play in the cold weather. Brandon also said he polled U-M players, who said they like to go to warm-weather bowl sites.

I give up. These guys really are that dumb. If I were the folks at ESPN, once I got them signed on the dotted line for the next postseason TV deal, I’d invite ’em all over for a friendly game of poker. There’s no reason to leave them with any money in their wallets.

Ivan Maisel has a piece about what the NCAA thinks it has up its sleeve in terms of rewriting the rule book. Some of the proposals are eye-opening – 50 percent scholarship reductions and penalties of up to 5 percent of a school’s athletic budget are pretty tough sounding, no doubt.

But there are those pesky practical considerations that get in the way every time.

It’s difficult to find anyone in intercollegiate athletics who does not want the NCAA to move beyond outdated, nitpicking regulations and to handle cases in a more timely matter. But the discussion of greater accountability is meeting resistance from those who would be held accountable. [Emphasis added.]

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, duh.

The coaches in particular are likely to have a mass apoplectic fit over this:

Under the current NCAA bylaw, a head coach is “presumed” to have knowledge of what is occurring in his program and “can be responsible” for the actions of his assistants.

The proposed change would do away with presumption. It would make the head coach responsible for his assistants’ actions regardless of his knowledge of them. The penalties would range from 5 to 100 percent of competition in a season.

“I guess they expect us to become compliance officers,” said Maryland football coach Randy Edsall…

Why, Randy, you say that as if it’s a bad thing.

The only way this goes anywhere if a scandal occurs so huge that a failure to act threatens to ruin the NCAA’s credibility beyond recovery (think 1919 Black Sox-like). We’re not even close to that. So I’ll be surprised if anything truly substantive results from this. Not that Mark Emmert won’t paint the results as anything other than that, regardless of what they produce.